Predynastic Egypt

Research in recent decades has gradually given us a picture of how the historical Egyptian state system came to be, and possibly even how the extraordinary notion came to prevail that the Pharaoh was a god rather than a human. It is to these questions that we turn now.

Climatic Shifts. Egypt was not always a river valley flowing through a desert. Or more exactly, in pre-Egyptian times, the Sahara was not always a desert. In Late Paleolithic times, roughly 12,000 to 6,000 BC, the Sahara was a wide grassland, somewhat similar to the lands known as the Sahel that lie just south of the Sahara today. What was to become Egypt included wooded and savannah areas. The river was wider and slower, and its great floods tended to spread more broadly over the land and flowed with less force. The Delta, once a gigantic bay, was only beginning to fill with fertile silt.

As the climate changed with the end of the Pleistocene, and northern Africa got warmer, desertification gradually set in (with occasional reversals). Animals tended to move away from the dryer areas, and humans tended to follow them. As the forests gave way to savannah and the savannah to desert, there was a gradual migration and consolidation of some of this population into the Nile valley, and with it the beginnings of dependency on agriculture, but the details are not very clear.

Many scholars have come to the conclusion that plant and animal domestication spread from the Near East into northern Africa about 6000 BC, give or take as much as a thousand years.

Population Movement. Many people moved into the Egyptian portion of the Nile valley, but just how different they were, either from each other or from earlier valley dwellers, is unclear.
As foragers they would have hunted various animals in the surrounding countryside (deer, rodents, etc.), as well as the creatures of the river ecology: fish, shellfish, turtles, waterfowl, and occasional larger river animals such as hippopotami or crocodiles. Among the wild plants in the valley were river rushes (including papyrus), as well as wild wheat.

By about 5000 BC we can see clearly the beginnings of Neolithic, farming life, although still with some foraging mixed in, both in the river valley itself and in the river delta to the north.